Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Planning ahead

As I've mentioned, I have a little warlock, to play together with my girlfriend, "just the two of us", trying to do content that was definitely not designed to be two-manned.

Well, this little lock is not so little anymore, so I thought herbalism is maybe not the dream job for a warlock. Dropped it and started leveling enchanting, using my own old guide.

As you know the enchanters need serveral rods, crafted by blacksmiths. They are either terribly overpriced (900-2000% of material cost), or missing from the AH.

People use to buy them when they need them. First they buy a silver, then half hour later a gold and so on. They pay the ridiculous price or spam trade for a BS for 5-10 mins for each rod.

Not me! When I needed the silver rod, I've checked the AH for all rods, up to titanium. Only arcanite was near the price of its materials, bought that. Then I got materials for all other rods, and spammed trade for a BS, offering 50G tip. Found one in 5 mins, flied to Orgrimmar (I do the AH and tradeskill stuff in TB, I love that city). The BS crafted all my rods and I was set for my whole enchanter carrier.

The moral of the story is obvious: plan your road ahead and buy the things you'll need when they are cheap, or in one big batch, getting discount. Some tips:

If you are lvl 75-79 and plan to raid but have no guild who will boost you in greens, start buying epics or materials for epics.

If you are leveling a tradeskill, seek for higher level materials too. It's quite annoying to need 1 more stack of wool cloth for tailoring 150 and the AH is empty.

If you are leveling a twink, start collecting BoE blues and enchanting scrolls during the process.

While you're leveling quest for the factions that you'll need the reputation later. If you want Argent Crusade rep for example, go to Zul Drak at lvl 75, skip Grizzly. If you want Horde Expedition rep, do both starting zones, Dragonblight and Grizzly, even if the quests are green.

If you plan to have a gathering profession, level it up to the zone where you quest. DK-s use to make the great mistake to level to 80, then starting to level mining. No. Level it to 300 before you go to Outland, so you can mine there while questing.

If the quest requires a buyable item, have it with yourself before you get the quest.

Planning ahead may need some time, but repays it greatly in time not wasted later.

Crafting yourself some nice items? It will be a lot cheaper to find someone who crafts it for you and tip him 50g then to pût in the thousands of gold to level your profession. There are very little bop profession items these days.

For the unique bonusses such as a fancy shoulder enchant? That's really only needed for the top end raiders.

To make gold? Well, estimate how much gold you'll put into levelling your profession. Then take a look and see how long it will take you to get your gold back and make a profit. Still want to level it?

I've personally picked up inscription to make gold. And I haven't bothered to pick up a second profession. Putting in a few thousand gold just to get +32 strength doesn't seem worth it to me.

Enchanting is (IMO) the profession it's most important to level up with you. You'll be getting a half-dozen rewards every level that you either can't equip or that replace stuff you're currently equipping. Disenchanting this is way better than vendoring it (soulbound).

Another important topic on this "planning ahead" is to look at a class website and check to see where the best quest rewards are. If some of your best pre-heroic boots come from a Storm Peaks questline, you may want to get out there before 80 to get started on it. Similarly, you should plan ahead for what your second spec should be, and don't throw out gear that might be decent in that spec. For instance, I'm a Elemental/Resto Shaman leveling in Northrend. I'm deliberately keeping any gear with +hit on it, because I know that I'll want that in my Elemental gear, but want to drop it in my Resto gear. I've now got about 4 pieces that I swap when I switch specs (to heal an instance, for instance).

Carra - that only really works if you're on a populated server. If it's medium or low population, you may not consistently have access to all that many of one profession or another unless you're in a large guild, in which case you're expected to be min/maxing or share your profession with others.

First off, every profession makes money. So having more means more opportunities. Furthermore chain combining professions to make a profit can be even more lucrative:Enchanting-Jewelcrafting, Inscription-Enchanting, Alchemy-Jewelcrafting, Tailoring-Enchanting ,etc.

Leveling a profession mustnt be that costly, especially if you PLAN ahead.

If you pick up enchanting at level 5, with all the greens you disenchant you will never have to spend 1copper on materials. Same goes for every other profession especially if you pair it with the right gathering profession(or have another character with the correspondant gathering profession and you stock pile the mats you pick up while questing, etc).

Secondly, having professions available saves you a lot of time, nerves and sometimes even gold, when looking for someone to craft something and they are not to be found or the current available offer is obscenely overpriced.

And lastly, on top of all this presented above, an extra 32 strength is nice to have, really.

So I've been a lwer since lvl 5 and I'm wondering if I should drop it for insc, I have all the mats for 1-450 INSC sitting in a bank tab and idk if it would be profitable to lvl insc,ATM I'm not earning anything from lwing,all my gold comes from jc/de and tailoring

There are enough professions that aren't that hard to level where NOT having a second profession is pretty silly, and will make you look bad in the eyes of a guild. If you can't be bothered to do another crafting profession, then go mining/skinning or herbing. You are an inscriptor with an empty profession slot, and you haven't picked up herbing? lol. Not saying that you should farm hard-core, but having it available, with no "cost" is a no-brainer.

Dear Mr.Goblin;In replicating your glyph business model on aman'thul i have come across some points i'd like to mention. First being that post duel spec patch there seems to be an overall drop in the demand for glyphs. Second, undercutting by 40% or even 50% which i have tried still has me being undercut hours if not minutes later. Combined with my first point, i'm forced to run my 'cancel all auctions' macro and relist them every 6 hours on average. Very time consuming indeed, and even this only moderately boosts the % of glyphs sold vs up for sale on the AH. All this brings me to my third point. Considering that after mass milling icethorn which i buy whenever it is at 18g or less per stack i get one snowfall ink in return; and that one snowfall ink sells for 18 to 19g like hotcakes, then i am left with all my inks and parchment at no risk of loss to myself. I now exlusively make the highest selling glyphs , of which there are few. I still follow your method of making 7, putting 5 up for sale and storing the other 2 as inventory in the bank but for a different reason. On average, one stack of icethorn mills into inks that will create 5 glyphs. Since the snowfall ink recuperates my initial investment, i now simply list the 5 glyphs for 4g each flat price. I'm looking for 4g x 5 sold = 20g profit per stack of icethorn, or slightly over 100% return on investment. This is undecutting the competition by 70% sometimes however it eliminates a great deal of the cat and mouse undercutting game. I now get resellers snapping them up which helps my cash flow at the opportunity cost of having a much larger profit. I've also found that surprisingly, people will still come in and undercut this absurdly low price to prices closer to 3g which is breakeven for them if they haven't sold their snowfall ink. Now since i've narrowed the market down to about 20 expensive glyph categories that i sell in, at 5 each that's only 100 glyphs up for sale. It leaves me a ton of ink leftover, which i convert 10:1 for a snowfall ink and sell that instead for quick cash. I cannot consider making the darkmoon cards as the price for a nobles deck continues to deteriorate monthly so holding inventory in the form of nobles cards i akin to holding a front month option in the stock market ; i'm losing money by time decay.

In pursuing this line of business one must absolutely refrain from making any glyph retailing under 10g as you mentioned. The 8g glyphs get undercut by me to 5g'ish ; and then undercut by someone else to 3g. At that point i had to either cat and mouse undercut repost all the way down to 1g (yes ppl will go this low, its astounding) or just let it sit for 3g unsold and wait for a later time period while the market reprices itself. Nope, i'd rather stick to the highest price tag ones so i'm picked up by the reseller's scans all the while selling the snowfall's to the lottery-heads who buy em up to make their 25% chance-to-be-profitable nobles card.

When i'm not trying to replicate your business model as described in my post below i'm trying to also figure out what best to do with the mats my wife gathers for me when i'm asleep or out at the gym (at 42 living oversees my life has distilled down to these 3 things..wow,sleep,gym ; how sad)

The wifey is a grinding machine. She flies my druid around scooping up mining ore, herbs, and the eternals and rare jewels that come with it. Now the eternals help out in the crafting of titansteel which i can smelt once a day, and the other eternals go towards my mage for making tailoring leg enchants and whatnot. The herbs and frost lotus's get sent to my elixir spec mage to mass produce flasks relying on the procs to eek out a tiny bit more profit than if i just sold the herbs straight up on the market. I cringe at the times ill make 20x2 flasks and only get a single x4 proc or something goofy like that as it ends up being a loss after selling them compared to how much i would have made just selling the herbs.

My question to you is what to do with the stacks of saronite ore that is in the bank. I crush the price if i flood the market with them, but the incoming flow of the stacks from her grinding is surpassing the usual amount of stacks i put up for sale. So recently i've had 3 people mail me in game saying they have noticed i am constantly selling stacks and they ask me to send as many as i can to them for 16g c.o.d. One offered me 17g per stack but wouldn't go higher. So what opportunity am i missing here? Are they prospecting it and making a higher return on jewelcrafting? Smelting them into bars produces the same profits as selling the ore on the ah more or less. So, what opportunity am i missing is what im asking. When i told the one offering to buy all for 17g a stack (ah price fluctuates around 18g) that i had over 200 stacks to c.o.d to her to fish for her reaction she could hardly control her enthusiasm. I'm missing something then, can you guys help find the hidden opportunity here?

I have to say having max professions on multiple toons is very handy. For the above example you can take a stack of saronite ore and you have several options to make money. You can prospect the stack for gems of which the blue can be sold and the green gems can be turned into rings and sent to your enchanter to be melted. Likewise the saronite could go to your BS to turn out low cost blue items to be disenchanted selling the mats. Alchemy can take the saronite and over 3 days convert the stack into titanium (albiet with titanium cost as low as it is now not worth it.) Finally engineering can convert the saronite into either Arrow or Bullet boxes to sell on the AH.

All of the above can convert a stack of saronite into a profit above trying to sell them on the AH.

I don't focus on making money but when I want too I can turn out a huge profit in a very short time using my professions with no time spent farming materials.

Being a lover of playing the AH market and crafting in general, I find you hardly have to think about your gathering lvl, as it "naturally" lvls as you're making your armor, trinkets, or what-have-you.

I've noticed that in later patches the high end rods can be used in place of the lower rods.

Therefore it would seem to be a waste to buy the lower end rods if you can get your hands on a higher one. So if you are a level 80 starting from scratch, buy the mats for the highest rod, have it crafted and don't go through the bother of replacing it as you level up.

You haven't leveled enchanting ever have you :)You need the PREVIOUS "enchanted rod" to turn the Blacksmiths "raw rod" into the next level of "enchanted rod"In the really rough days of vanilla wow, you actually had to keep EACH rod in your inventory (or bank) if you wanted to do lower level enchants *shudder*

jaa & troy- Regarding people offering to buy saronite from you it may be people prospecting it for JC. I know for a while I bought saronite from a person who farmed it via COD and I used it for this purpose (along with stocking some up for 3.1, which didn't work out quite as well as I had hoped)

The more ore prospected the more likely you are to make off with a decent number of blue gems to pay for the ore that wielding nothing of value. This is probably why the person you were talking to was excited about that much ore.

But that's probably because I levelled a death knight. Spending the first few hours picking flowers in the lowbie zones didn't seem very attractive. And I never bothered with gathering outside of levelling so it's of little use.

If I were to level a character from level 1 taking skinning would be a good choice. It brings in money and is perfectly easy to level while levelling. Zero cost for some nice extra pocket money. Mining for example felt like I had to stop levelling to go get some ores. That wasn't much fun to me.

Two things, great article and I couldn't agree more on the dk comment. I think its worth adding that while I was leveling herbing and skinning on my dk I took him to the dranai starting zone and grabbed the low level quest to gain quite a bit of alliane rep while I was doing my professions.

Jaa/amp another thought on the saronite stacks. I have both a blacksmith and a JC and they both mine so I get lots of saronite. I have found on my blacksmith that I can make the 3rd saronite shield (the one just less than titansteel) and it will sell for 69-70g on my server. It takes 14 bars so 1.5 stacks of ore. So sell two stacks of ore for 34g or 1.5 as a shield for 70g. Thats what I do with my excess saronite.